incommodious

English

Etymology

in- + commodious

Adjective

incommodious (comparative more incommodious, superlative most incommodious)

  1. (of a place occupied by people) Uncomfortable or inhospitable, especially due to being cramped.
    • 1859, Charles Dickens, chapter 7, in A Tale of Two Cities, London: Chapman and Hall, [], OCLC 906152507:
      Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar . . . was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious.
    • 1909, Henry James, “Venice”, in Italian Hours:
      The place is small and incommodious, the pictures are out of sight and ill-lighted, the custodian is rapacious, the visitors are mutually intolerable, but the shabby little chapel is a palace of art.
    • 2010 June 15, Katherine Knorr, "Contemplating Art, and Its Sideshow," New York Times (retrieved 19 July 2012):
      In this they succeeded last week, despite menacing clouds and slick pavement, filling to capacity (and until past midnight) the 1937 building’s incommodious terrace with a mostly young and fairly international crowd.
  2. Discomforting, inconvenient, or unsuitable.
    Synonym: (obsolete) incommode
    • 1781, Samuel Johnson, "Savage" in Lives of the Poets:
      He was sometimes so far compassionated by those who knew both his merit and distresses that they received him into their families, but they soon discovered him to be a very incommodious inmate.
    • 1859, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], “chapter 52”, in Adam Bede [], volume (please specify |volume=I, II, or III), Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, OCLC 2108290:
      "What a silly you must be!" a comment which Tommy followed up by seizing Dinah with both arms, and dancing along by her side with incommodious fondness.
    • 1865, Charles Darwin, The Movement and Habits of Climbing Plants, ch. 1:
      A dense whorl of many leaves would apparently be incommodious for a twining plant.

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